U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip to Israel was tripped up by a preventable error – the Presidential limousine was mistakenly filled with diesel fuel instead of gasoline / petrol.

One of the limousines in Barack Obama’s fleet has broken after reports that it was mistakenly filled with the wrong fuel at the start of the US president’s visit to Israel.

Another limo is on its way from Jordan, according to Ma’an News agency, citing Israel’s Channel 10, to replace one that was filled with diesel instead of gasolene.

This is clearly a preventable error… one that could increase the risk of harm to the President if the vehicle broke down in an unsafe location. I’m curious to hear if there will be any “root cause analysis” and corrective actions taken to prevent a future re-occurrence (or somebody will just be punished).

In the U.S., diesel fuel nozzles at the pump are intentionally LARGER than nozzles for unleaded gasoline. This serves as a form of mistake proofing, or error proofing (read more at Professor John Grout’s excellent mistakeproofing.com website). It’s a bigger mess (without destroying the engine, though) when you mistakenly put diesel in a car that runs on unleaded gas than it would be vice versa… which is why it’s generally not as well error proofed against mistakenly putting unleaded into a diesel. BMW, though, has a system to prevent you from putting gas into a diesel.

Apparently having a larger diesel nozzle isn’t the case in all countries — perhaps including Israel? Or was this just a problem at the location where the limo was fueled up?

Mistake proofing is more effective than signs that tell people to “be more careful.” If an error CAN occur, it might not happen every day, but it’s basically inevitable when a person with an otherwise perfect track record has a bad day… as happened with the limo.

When I go to Grout’s website and click on the picture of the book cover, I get an error message. Tried it four times, coming from the website, three times, and you clickable link once. So, something is wrong somewhere. My computer is pretty new, an iMAC and has plenty of power. Any thoughts?

One correction to your article above, Last winter I put Diesel in my gas engine and it did wreck it completly. Had to replace the engine at $6,000.00. The self serve station that I used put diesel gas in the unleaded pump.
Thanks,
Kelly

I’m really sorry to hear that Kelly. Did the service station own up to the problem and pay for your repair?

I wonder if they have a way for the fuel delivery people to error proof their process (put the right fuel/octane into the right tanks) or if they just tell them to “be careful”?Mark Graban recently posted..Kaizen Questions… What If?